Street Angel (1928)

Silent Romance. - Street Angel review by Steve

The middle part of Frank Borzage's celebrated trilogy of silent romantic melodramas starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. The street angels are sex workers and the film relates the luckless attempts by one of them to escape the poverty and iniquity of her birth and find love with a naive, moralistic artist. It takes place in a Naples of the imagination, a distant place of passion and tragic fate.

At times it feels there is little happening on screen other than the wonderful magic created by the two stars. Farrell and Gaynor are the great romantic partners in early cinema. Their enduring chemistry and the fragility of their love in the face of an agonising destiny, is still compelling. These are hyper-romantic films about outsiders, down on their luck, but not easily giving up on their dreams.

They usually end on an uplift, but the tragedy is more persuasive. Love can never be enough to beat off the curse of pitiless fate in a brutal world of injustice and poverty. It is easy to see how these wonderful melodramas found their way into the hearts of audiences as the world went into the depression.

When Gaynor is torn away from Farrell and put in jail, they both whistle the same Italian ballad (on the Movietone soundtrack), like two birds who might die if separated. It's that intense. The setting is atmospheric, with vast constructions of foggy harbour-side slums. But realism isn't a priority. This is a spiritual film, where love is a brief glimpse of happiness seized from an endless panorama of sorrow.